A short piece for y’all today. I wrote the following on spec for a certain popular site which was enthused about the idea until I submitted it and then I heard nothing from them. Their loss is your gain, hope this stirs some thoughts for the start of your week.
I have a suggestion for you today: take a step back and look around. Look at what is going on in your town, your city, your neighborhood. Look at what is happening in your family, to your friends, at your church. What do you see? Good and bad things, no doubt, sometimes all one or the other, but more often than not, a little bit of both. What is it you want to see? If you told me, I am willing to wager you would say, to see the good win out over the bad. A true victory.
This is a natural impulse. And in times such as these, certainly understandable. No one has been left untouched by misfortune and misdeeds, be they large or small. I am also willing to wager that you would say it is the system in which we live that is most responsible, and that what you feel is that what was promised has been taken from you. Dispossession is your sense of where we are today.
Dispossession is not too excessive a word. We are having things taken from us, and not simply material things or the expectation that we might be able to attain them, but the intangibles, too. The very norms on which our God-given sense of reality rest are being dissolved before our eyes as we make a full transition into a simulation that passes for a technocratic, global civilization. We feel that everything we had depended on is corroding before our eyes. What is more, the speed with which it occurs makes it feels as this descent is unprecedented.
There persists among many people, though, a perception that this is all a new development, that some recent president numbered 40-something, or his party, is responsible. Or that some ideology is responsible, or some other less abstract, more personified villain. This perception is not limited to the left or the right, or any class or race. It is a thoroughly American perception. It comes from our nostalgia for the post-1945 world. Search through social media and when you see people invoking the good old days against the current descent, it is almost always photos from the 1950s. The height of American ascendancy, when morality and unity and nationalism reigned as they should.
Why do we latch onto this post-1945 paradigm as the best one? The straightest answer is that our reference points for any time before that simply do not exist. Perhaps part of that is because much, if not most, of the population of the United States today arrived in that post-1945 world and has no inherited referent for understanding otherwise. Certainly part is that we have simply forgotten, willfully or otherwise, our own history. We today simply do not have any perception that the world we have known for 70-plus years, even those halcyon days of boomer youth, is indeed the aberration, and that the disintegration we experience now was baked in even before then. We simply could not see it, or, being human, would not. Only now that our relative comfort is threatened with dissolution are we willing to look elsewhere.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once noted that Russia’s greatest advances in freedom had always come from defeat and her repressions from victory. This is counterintuitive to the American mind and, in many ways, noxious to our own conception of ourselves. But there is an analogue to our own history in Solzhenitsyn’s comment. It is that the victory in our minds, a state of perpetually winning at everything everywhere as a society and a people, is actually the source of our dispossession and perhaps soon-to-be oppression.
One must understand the historical process that created such conditions. To dispossession, let us add a partner word: consolidation. The United States as we have known it, a powerful, singular nation-state, was never a given. In its early decades, the fledgling federation more than once nearly experienced division into separate polities. New England threatened secession as much as the Southern states. Had this occurred, the different regions would have had to find different political and economic bases. Each of the new political unions would have had to develop itself on a regional basis, for the massive, singular market that was the U.S. would have been gone. These regional political unions would have been more responsive to local conditions and desires. Let New England have a central bank for just itself, and the South its cash crops for unfettered export, and the West its alliance with either of the two as it saw fit. In such a paradigm, it is more likely that the economy of all areas would have continued on the basis since colonial days: small scale and locally productive, be it a farm, a business, or an industry. Certainly small farms would have remained as an integral part of the social and economic fabric. “This should be the important end of polity,” wrote Andrew Nelson Lytle, “for only when families are fixed in their habits, sure of their property, hopeful for the security of their children, jealous of liberties which they cherish, can the State keep the middle course between impotence and tyranny.”
But that is not what happened.
Regardless of your feelings about the War Between The States, the fact remains that 1865 was the root of economic consolidation in the United States. With no more political risk of popular sovereignty asserting itself through separation, the country could be turned into a single economic unit. From the late 19th century onward, what were once local and regional economies became mere appendages of the national economy. Economic power was consolidated and became centered in cities and corporations. This was a good, patriotic process, according to those who ran the show. By the time of our grandparent’s generation, the economy had become synonymous with the nation.
It is true, the religious, cultural, and social norms Americans were accustomed to did not change much. It was the economic foundation that changed. But this laid the groundwork for our situation today. Once family farms were pushed or pulled into a cash economy and massive industries came to dominate, the most immediate grounding for human life together disappeared, and distant powers began to supply people with what they needed (or were told they needed). In his memoir Red Hills and Cotton, the journalist Ben Robertson described this profound change in his own family:
Like the other Southerners of their generation, they were fighting men and women, believing always in standing and in having things out whenever their ideal was threatened, but the chaotic industrial triumph that following the paving of the roads bewildered them. The boom was worse for them than the Civil War, for in the Civil War they had been able to take up positions with artillery and to shoot, but during this latter era they were unable ever to pin the enemy down. They could not get within shooting distance of engineers and presidents of corporations.
Big business men did not fight at such places as Gettysburg and Chickamauga -- they hired lawyers and retreated through court after court with the letter of the law as their protection. My grandfather believed in the freedom of the spirit. The engineers believed in a standard of living.
Those last two lines spell the difference: the material world was substituted for the spiritual world in the values of the people. Once the substitution is made, it is easy for someone to feel that they are owed a high standard of living. They abandon old verities for consumption. This we are all familiar with. But the corrosion of our long-accepted human norms originated in this materialistic outlook on life, created by the great consolidated economic society. For we ourselves have become objects of consumption. The charts all show ever-diminishing economic prospects with each passing generation and thus less and less hope that each generation will be able to attain what its parents had -- dispossession once again. But rather than acknowledge this, the system buries the fact and instead makes us consume ourselves. The transgender movement is a perfect example: your body and your identity are now objects to be consumed. You do not acquire material possessions to protect and serve your self, rather, you now consume your self in some sort of perverse self-sacrifice.
It is clearly the same logic, the very same, of this long-developing paradigm working itself out. It is that world that victory secured for us, whether it was victory in 1945 or 1919 or 1865. But this flies in the face of what we have been taught: that victory is good, always and forever, and there are no consequences. The reality, though, is that victory ruins, literally. In many cases, and almost exclusively in the modern world, victory destroys the very foundation of what it was supposed to protect. This is not a comforting fact for a people like Americans, who have carefully excised all downturns, setbacks, and tragedies from their own history if they do not point toward a better future. The thought that out of disaster comes some sort of providence is heretical to a people whose understanding of prosperity has been altered to that of picking the low-hanging fruit of history and selling off their own patrimony.
Our ancestors would not have seen it in such terms. They knew, and they remembered. Indeed, they knew because they remembered. That is to say, their perception of the present was leavened with knowledge of the past, and not simply abstract history like that memorized from a textbook for a quiz, but relevant, personalized experience by people not so different from themselves. The fact that the gains and losses were known and that nonetheless the generations had persisted with sense of self and place intact was more important than any assignation of value to distant and abstract victories. It was more important that one had figured out how to make the family farm a stable place than whether the GDP was growing or Congress had passed a much-lauded omnibus bill or arrival of a new store in town. Value was set within the chain of being and there was a cost to be paid for personal failures, be it one’s own or one’s predecessors.
Of course, sometimes even the best that simple people living by God’s word can give is not enough to preserve them against the worst. In that same chapter, Ben Robertson wrote, “In 1919 my Great-Aunt Narcissa asked my grandfather: ‘How much longer can we hold out?’ ‘Twenty years,’ my grandfather answered.” Twenty years on was 1939, the start of the Second World War in Europe, into which America went two years later. And out of that victory, which no one in their right mind would have not thought of fighting for, came this paradigm we are facing now: dispossession, decay, and, for many, despair. If only Great-Aunt Narcissa had known how prophetic she had been.
Certainly there are signs that many are realizing what has happened and, rather than resigning themselves, are acting. Movements toward homesteading, homeschooling, and other efforts at a parallel society are gaining steam and many fruits will come from these. These are empowering acts, as they bring independence. That being said, in the growth of such power lurks a danger. Successful independence will come into competition with the powers that be, and from competition comes rivalry. In Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry, if two sides are well differentiated, there is little danger of conflict between them. But the more that two sides become alike, the more likely they enter into conflict. Growing in ability and power, any independent movement inevitably will come into conflict with the powers that be. There will be many moments where choices must be made, between whatever values the movement originally intended to uphold on one side and victory on the other. This will be the temptation, because we are taught that victory will get us what we want, despite our history showing otherwise, and we will pursue it. Any movement that does may very well find itself becoming like its opponents. We may fall back into our amnesia that we only just struggled out of, forgetting the very process that created the Leviathan of our dispossession and leaving for our offspring a tragedy of our own making. If forgetting is at the root of this dispossession, what are we to do?
“He remembered what others remembered.” That is what I wrote of the protagonist in my new novel, Victory Ruins, which is launching May 20th. He knew who he was and where he was, not simply from his own memory, but from what others had passed down to him. Did it secure him what he had always wanted? That is the wrong question. The real question is, what did he choose to do with what he was given, with what he remembered of what was remembered? Did he let it guide him in traversing a world changed so radically from old to new? Or did he reject it in favor of endless battle, destroying himself and everything entrusted to him in the hope of victory? We must have stories like these to remind and retrain ourselves how to consider and judge and persevere again and again. If we do not, we will find ourselves helpless before a force bent on our destruction, or we will find ourselves to be that force, finding out too late that victory can ruin all we were blessed with.